GSoC 2019: Community Bonding Period - I#
This post encapsulates my proceedings with the GSoC project that I have been working on, and a short log on the meeting that I had with my mentors.
Community Bonding Period: Getting acquainted with the environment#
So first things first, after getting selected for GSoC’ 2019, all of the people of participants who got through the proposal selection, got a wave of congratulations from the SunPy developers, who are quite friendly.
Soon, I got my first mail from Open Astronomy, the organization which is responsible for conducting the event smoothly. We were asked to submit a PR without RSS feed credentials for easy access to the blog posts that we are to make every week (or two).
I never had the first-hand experience with RSS feeds, so I got a bit anxious about making one. But soon, the mentors had agreed on making an account on medium, and since medium has an RSS feed https://medium.com/feed/@yashrsharma44 it was almost taken care of. So all in all, it helped in fast-tracking the process and getting started with the blog-posts.
Gearing up for the work: Reading the codebase#
Well for starters, I had been reading through the codebase of ``NDCube`` for a long period of time, right from my contribution period, so I had mostly assumed that it would be a cake walk. But boy, was I so wrong, as while going through my proposal, I had tried to make a prototype, but it was language agnostic. So all in all, what I realized that solving an issue is quite different from making a feature.
Overall, my condition wasn’t so bad, if not good, as I still had gone through the codebase and made some notes, so that was a cookie point for myself. There were some areas (which I realized during my meeting with mentors) which was not conceptually clear, though I was able to figure out the logic of the code.
Meeting with the mentors: An exciting moment#
Meeting with the mentors was the first thing that I was looking forward to, as I had interacted with them earlier, and they were quite pragmatic in dealing with queries, often responding as fast as possible, with some hint of chirpy comments from Cadair, who made the moment light.
On the day of the phone-screen meeting, as they say, it was scheduled on a Friday, in the evening. I had been to the meetings once, so I knew how each of them looked like . We started with me explaining to them what was the purpose of ``NDCube`` according to me: I tried to give my point of view, about how ``NDCube`` is a utility package from a contributor’s point of view, and how I had felt about the impact of the software.
We then had a talk, in which both the mentors mostly discussed with themselves, discussing the scope of the project and how do we need to proceed. The meeting mostly proceeded with me listening to there views, as it was imperative to absorb their approach and how they thought about the working of the different parts of ``NDCube``.
Soon, I got to realize about the different contextual meaning of each of the parts of ``NDCube`` as it was quite intuitive with the way, the mentors, particularly Dan Ryan, explained. The meeting was quite long, which meant that I was starting to lose out on the objectives and pointers of the meeting. Cadair started to document down all the requirements of the project, which made it quite simple to understand it. Of course, the low-level idea about the goals required me to discuss with them as required, but the overall high-level idea helped me breaking down the projects into small doable parts, and hopefully, help me in deciding the pace of my coding.
My takeaways#
The meeting in general, helped me in propelling my understanding of the project, particularly the intuition of ``NDCube``(thanks to Dan Ryan) and how it functions, so I am much better equipped to take on the further challenges of the project.
Previous Post#
Getting selected for GSoC’ 2019